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Comment by richardw | Hacker News Reader

I’ve wondered how extremely bright ancestors figured out the basics. Carrying water. The benefits of cooking food. How rocks or logs rolling could become a wheel. How you actually kill a large animal the first time. How to try berries in a new area. How did they figure bread out?

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Bread is actually not that difficult to figure out. Grains are easier to digest if you grind them up. Somebody didn't want to use their teeth to do so and invented a form of dough. Yeasts are everywhere, so it's just a matter of bringing the dough sufficiently close to your fire to get something that resembles proto-bread.

Sure but each bit isn’t obvious before you’ve seen it. Lots of people you know would just chew the grains after boiling because that’s what we’ve always done. Every so often someone stops and thinks about trying to crush it.

How many remote tribes have bread? Obviously generally requires precursors like farming.

You just oversimplified picking grains at the right time, grinding them to a powder, mixing it raw with water, but not too much, adding a third weird ingredient, and cooking it. At every stage you have a product that’s not really edible. Someone had to experiment.

Minimal bread requires only grain and water. At first this would have been unleavened bread, but because the yeast is already present on the grain, leavened bread can be accidentally invented just by forgetting about it for a while.

This is basically a creationist argument - life is complex so someone must have pulled the strings. But given enough time all of that can randomly go exactly right.

Obviously it did, I was just arguing against “is actually not that difficult to figure out.” Everything is easy after you know how it’s done, but before it you only have grain berries and maybe a soup with grains.

it's important to understand that evolutionary processes are not random. People experimenting with proto-bread would tend to prefer the best results, even if some steps are discovered by accident.

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